The air had chilled, grown exceptionally rarefied, thinned by rebuke. Makepeace was having difficulty breathing. A tableau of deep resentment had been drawn in the room, growing in definition for what seemed several political lifetimes. Slowly Makepeace also stood.
‘Prime Minister, believe me I had no intention…’
Others grasped the opportunity. Two Cabinet Ministers on their feet must indicate an end to the meeting, a chance to bring to a close such extraordinary embarrassment. There was a general rustling of papers and as rapidly as seemed elegant they departed without any further exchange of words.
Urquhart was angry. With life, with Drabble, Burke and Makepeace, with them all, but mostly with himself. There were rules between ‘the Colleagues’, even those whose ambition perched on their shoulders like storm-starved goshawks.
‘Thou shalt honour thy colleagues, within earshot.’
‘Thou shalt not be caught bearing false witness.’
‘Thou shalt not covet thy colleague’s secretary or job (his wife, in some cases, is fair game).’
‘Thou shalt in all public circumstances wish thy colleagues long life.’
Urquhart had broken the rules. He’d lost his temper and, with it, control of the situation. He had gone much further than he’d intended, displayed insufferable arrogance, seeming to wound for the sake of it rather than to a purpose. In damaging others, he had also damaged himself. There was repair work to be done.
But first he needed a leak.
It was as he was hurrying to the washroom outside the Cabinet Room that, near the Henry Moore sculpture so admired by Mortima, he saw a grim-faced Makepeace being consoled by a colleague. His quarry had not fled, and here was an opportunity to bind wounds and redress grievances in private.
‘Tom!’ he summoned, waving to the other who, with evident reluctance, left the company of his colleague and walked doggedly back towards the Cabinet Room. ‘A word, please, Tom,’ Urquhart requested, offering the smallest token of a smile. ‘But first, a call of nature.’
Urquhart was in considerable discomfort, all the tension and tea of the morning having caught up with him. He disappeared into the washroom, but Makepeace didn’t follow, instead loitering outside the door. Urquhart had rather hoped he would come in, – there can be no formality or demarcation of authority in front of a urinal, an ideal location for conversations on a basis of equality, man to man. But Makepeace had never been truly a member of the club, always aloof, holding himself apart. As now, skulking around outside like a schoolboy waiting to be summoned to the headmaster’s study, damn him.
And damn this. Urquhart’s bladder was bursting, but the harder he tried the more stubborn his system seemed to grow. Instead of responding to the urgency of the situation, it seemed to constrict, confining itself to a parsimonious dribble. Did all men of his age suffer such belittlement, he wondered? This was silly – hurry, for pity’s sake! – but it would not be hurried. Urquhart examined the porcelain, then the ceiling, concentrated, swore, made a mental note to consult his doctor, but nothing seemed to induce his system to haste. He was glad now that Makepeace hadn’t joined him to witness this humiliation.
Prostate. The old man’s ailment. Bodily mechanics that seemed to have lost contact with the will.
‘Tom, I’ll catch you later,’ he cried through the door, knowing that later would be too late. There was a scuffling of feet outside and Makepeace withdrew without a word, taking his resentment with him. A moment lost, an opportunity slipped. A colleague turned perhaps to opponent, possibly to mortal enemy.
‘Damn you, come on!’ he cursed, but in vain.
And when at last he had finished, and removed cuff links and raised sleeves in order to wash his hands, he had studied himself carefully in the mirror. The sense inside was still that of a man in his thirties, but the face had changed, sagged, grown blemished, wasted of colour like a winter sky just as the sun slips away. The eyes were now more bruised than blue, the bones of the skull seemed in places to be forcing their way through the thinning flesh. They were the features of his father. The battle he could never win.
‘Happy birthday, Francis.’
Booza-Pitt had no hesitation. In many matters he was a meticulous, indeed pedantic, planner, dividing colleagues and acquaintances into league tables of different rank which merited varying shades of treatment. The First Division consisted of those who had made it or who were clearly on the verge of making it to the very peaks of their professional or social mountains; every year they would receive a Christmas card, a token of some personal nature for wife or partner (strictly no gays), an invitation to at least one of his select social events and special attention of a sort that was logged in his personal secretary’s computer. The cream. For those in the Second Division who were still in the process of negotiating the slippery slopes there was neither token nor undue attention; the Third consisted of those young folk with prospects who were still practising in the foothills and received only the encouragement of a card. The Fourth Division, which encompassed most of the world who had never made it into a gossip column and were content in life simply to sit back and admire the view, for Geoffrey did not exist.
Annita Burke was, of course, First Division but had encountered a rock slide that would probably dump her in the Fourth, yet until she hit the bottom of the ravine there was value to be had. She was standing to one side in the black-and-white-tiled entrance hall of Number Ten, smoothing away the fluster and composing herself for the attentions of the world outside, when Geoffrey grabbed her arm.
‘That was terrible, Annita. You must be very angry.’
There were no words but her eyes spoke for her.
‘You need cheering up. Dinner tonight?’
Her face lit at the unexpected support; she nodded.
‘I’ll be in touch.’ And with that he was gone. Somewhere intimate and gossipy, he thought – it would be worth a booth at Wiltons – where the flames of wounded feelings and recrimination might be fanned and in their white heat could be hammered out the little tools of political warfare, the broken confidences, private intelligences and barbs which would strengthen him and weaken others. For those who were about to die generally preferred to take others with them.
Dinner and gossip, no more, even though she might prove to be vulnerable and amenable. It had been more than fifteen years since they’d spent a romping afternoon in a Felixstowe hotel instead of in the town hall attending the second day of the party’s youth conference debating famine in the Third World. They both remembered it very keenly, as did the startled chambermaid, but a memory it should remain. This was business.
Anyway, Geoffrey mused, necrophilia made for complicated headlines.
I will trust him when I hold his ashes in my hand.
It stood in a back street of Islington, on the point where inner city begins to give way to north London’s sprawling excess, just along from the railway arches which strained and grumbled as they bore the weight of crowded commuter trains at the start of their journey along the eastern seaboard. During the day, the street bustled with traffic and the bickering and banter from the open-air market, but at night, with the poor street lighting and particularly when it was drizzling, the scene could have slipped from the pages of Dickens. The deep shadows and dark alleyways made people reluctant to pass this way, unless they had business. And, in this street, the business after dusk was most likely to be Evanghelos Passolides’.
His tiny front-room restaurant lay hidden behind thick drawn curtains and a sign on the grimy window which in loud and uncharitable voice announced that the establishment was closed. There was no menu displayed, no welcoming light. It appeared as though nothing had been touched for months,